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Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

theguardian.com

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Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#281
post #265
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women's right to choose what goes in their bodies is an important right in Canada. Not to worry the wartime act will be used on something you personally care about but by that time your rights will be gone.

^ Exhibit A: commenter fails to recognize that there are sometimes good reason to temporarily limit rights, such as to limit the spread of infectious diseases, because commenter knows very little about public health or epidemiology. Commenter believes that anytime rights are limited, it's for a nefarious purpose, and it can't possibly be for a good reason. How's the syphillis and HIV treating you? Oh what's that? You…

They also don’t understand that the “wartime act” is not the act that was invoked. In fact, the War Measures Act has not existed in Canada for nearly 40 years.

It was replaced by the Emergencies Act, which explicitly does not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, unlike its predecessors.

It just goes to show how knowledgeable the previous poster is on the subject.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how anyone can say "we're still early" or "we are only at the beginning stages of R&D in this space" considering crypto is 14 years old and has had marquee VC and other investment to the tune of tens/hundreds of billions of dollars for at least half a decade.

Cryptocurrency generation mechanics are 14 years old. Run-time and application deployables on top are not 14 years old. This is a brand new space and it's still in its infancy. Ethereum is an amazing technology.

Moving the goal posts a little but sure.

Ethereum is eight years old. The Ethereum foundation alone has a billion dollars. Ethereum and the related ecosystem has had tens of billions of dollars thrown into it. I don’t know how that can be described as “infancy”.

The web was opened by CERN in 1993. By 2001 it was being used by over 500 million people daily. Please look at an eth block explorer and tell me how many people are using it daily.

I’ll spoil it for you: in terms of the five billion people on the internet, essentially no one.

How long is the crypto community going to excuse the complete adoption failure, horrendous and unacceptable behavior, etc with “it’s still early”? Please point to another technology with tens of billions of dollars of investment and almost a decade of development described as being in infancy.

I swear we’ll be here in another decade hearing the same thing.

If there's anything the crypto community needs to do - stop pumping, shilling, sticking your head in the sand in fantasy land, step out of your echo chamber, and take a good hard look to figure out why no one is using whatever you're building.

Maybe then, and only then, will these applications ever step out of complete obscurity.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#283

> “All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose. They bought a lot of stuff, and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society. AI does,” Kagan told the Guardian. No, the crypto mining industry collapsed because the largest GPU-mined cryptocurrency (Ethereum) removed the ability for people to m…

Wasn’t Nvidia trying to block cryptomining a year or two ago so they could sell to their core target markets in peace? It seems difficult to reconcile “we’re actively trying to stop cryptominers from buying our product” actions with “we’re against cryptomining only because they’re not buying our product” views.

Sort of. My opinion is that the "we love gamers, partners please stop selling to miners" and the LHR limiter were both virtue signaling.

What was a legitimate problem was being preferentially sucked off shelves by miners. When NVIDIA was 2x as good as AMD, and it led to NVIDIA cards being priced 2x as high as AMD, that was a problem. And that was happening - prices lined up perfectly according to hashrate, and AMD cards had lower hashrates because they had narrower memory buses and infinity cache didn't help mining. They were taking heat in tech media for failure to control prices/get supply under control (despite roughly 2x'ing their usual production) and potentially losing users to AMD

Solution: drop the hash rate by half. Now you are no longer preferentially being sucked off shelves and LHR cards should approximate the price of their AMD counterparts. You don't lose out on miner sales completely, but you're not disproportionately affected. And if there is a bust, you are both equally affected then too.

So it wasn't a fullhearted "we want miners OUT of the gaming market". If that was the case you'd have slowed it down by like 90-95%. They were happy to have the sales from miners, they just didn't want to suffer a competitive disadvantage relative to AMD due to miners gobbling up inventory.

I am not quite sure what to make out of the mining cards side of the equation. They have done this at least twice now (P104 mining cards, etc) but they never seem to lean into it fully in the sense of really shunting inventory heavily towards mining. And yet they know that a lot of gaming cards are being sold to miners, including big direct-to-farm sales from partners (who love it because it's bulk and they force the farms to disclaim the warranty).

Perhaps it's an artifact of how it's really partners doing the ordering of products (including mining cards - those are all sold via partners not direct from NVIDIA). If they're ordered as gaming chips you get gaming chips, and partners may not want to take the risk of leaning into mining too hard. Maybe if there was a harsher mining limiter it might force partners to actually make a choice on it instead of fence-sitting with gaming inventory, who knows.

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On the other hand that strategy kind of missed in that AMD simply opted not to participate in the GPU market, when consoles were eating up 80% of their wafers off the top and the CPU market could shift their remaining wafers at 10x the margin of GPUs. See my other comment about the impossible boom/bust cycle of GPUs and AMD's answer is: simply don't participate in the GPU market during this cycle.

It took almost a full year for any of the 6000 series cards to show up in Steam Hardware Survey at a mere 0.15%. NVIDIA had 7-8% of the market being 30-series around the same point - and I doubt 30-series are being used in LAN cafes in china, that is a 1060/1650 phenomenon not one that hits all cards equally. And actually 6700XT rapidly overtook all three of the higher cards combined. AMD just barely made any of the 6800/6800XT/6900 series at all, for the first year.

You can't blame them when one $649-MSRP 6800XT with 520mm^2 of silicon and $200-300 of other BOM cost, could be sold as six 5800X processors (81mm^2 CCD, GloFo 12nm IO die) each with an MSRP of $449, or as 3/4 of an Epyc 64C that sells for $10k MSRP, with essentially no BOM cost. You are talking about selling the same piece of silicon for $200, $2700, or $7500, it's not a hard choice to make. And they could absolutely sell the CPUs at or above MSRP, and that's after cranking MSRP and dropping value SKUs already. So they did a token launch (as late as possible) to satisfy their legal obligation to investors and went and made some fucking money, and simply chose not to participate in the GPU bubble this time.

Increasingly I think the discrete GPU market is just a backstop for AMD. It's a place to soak up excess wafers if they order too much for CPUs and Epyc, and it's a slush fund of wafers if they have unexpected demand from CPUs and Epyc and consoles. It's not something they put an R&D focus on (a major chunk of RNDA1 and RDNA2's early-stage R&D were largely funded by Sony and MS) and it's not something they put first in their manufacturing priority. It's also why they're lagging on the features side of the equation - consoles are paying for the R&D and consoles don't care about tensor cores or video encoder quality or optical flow engines, and won't pay for it in their chips or even fund the R&D.

dGPUs are just a sponge to soak up any excess in the rest of the business, or squeeze a little extra out of. Not a focus anymore. Maybe that changes if they're the first to multi-GCD and have a real shot to win, but, in the current scenario they get 80% of the revenue for 20% of the effort and that's what they're doing.

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Now the other side of the "AMD simply chose not to participate in the GPU market" coin: it's all still a single market and AMD has to wait for the inventory to burn off too, even if it's NVIDIA inventory. OEMs like Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, etc aren't buying RDNA3 GPUs for their beige boxes or laptops if they have a bunch of Ampere sitting around, even if AMD inventory isn't high itself. Same for the secondary market, it doesn't matter if you are selling new RDNA3 cards if there are a bunch of used miner cards at great prices and people are buying used instead of new. It's all one market.

Some of the drop in marketshare despite deep price cuts is due to exactly this: OEMs aren't buying right now. Not buying anyone, but what's sitting in their stockpile is NVIDIA cards. And AMD can't make the big deals with OEMs that make up the majority of the market - the DIY market is a fraction of the overall market and AMD is selling great there (see: mindfactory numbers) due to aggressive pricing, but OEMs had piles of Ampere they need to get rid of. JPR did have some errors in the last set of numbers but still, the numbers for AMD are not great even then and that's the reason IMO, it's not DIY sales it's OEM sales.

I think the fact that they launched laptop Navi 33 in January but delayed the desktop until June is due to this: it's an inventory problem, and there is a lot of dGPU inventory still piled up. Not theirs, but that doesn't really matter.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China's 2021 ban didn't affect the crypto industry in any real way. Mining operations moved from China to the USA, a few irrelevant Chinese companies shuttered, and the industry continued business as usual. The most influential crypto companies were already incorporated in the west.

are you trying to tell me that the world’s second largest economy banning cryptocurrency had no real impact on demand for cryptocurrency?

I wasn't referring to the demand for units of cryptocurrency on particular networks. I was referring to actual industry, i.e. the companies that are researching, improving, and selling the technology itself.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#285
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interest rates in Argentina have been on an upward trend for the last decade [1], yet bitcoin is near its all time high relative to the Peso [2]. How do you explain the contradiction here? [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/interest-rate [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/btcars:cur

I fail to see the contradiction. The capital has already all fled Argentina, and higher rates aren’t going to entice many dollars back in.

The claim is higher interest rates cause things to collapse.

US interest rate go up, bitcoin go down!

Argentina interest rate go up, bitcoin go up!

Contradiction.

What you pointed out tho is important: fiat is a confidence game at the end of the day, and it doesn't matter how much yield a fiat offers if it lacks confidence.

Bitcoin is more or less a measure of how much confidence people have in their respective fiat currencies.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#286
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ Exhibit A: commenter fails to recognize that there are sometimes good reason to temporarily limit rights, such as to limit the spread of infectious diseases, because commenter knows very little about public health or epidemiology. Commenter believes that anytime rights are limited, it's for a nefarious purpose, and it can't possibly be for a good reason. How's the syphillis and HIV treating you? Oh what's that? You…

They also don’t understand that the “wartime act” is not the act that was invoked. In fact, the War Measures Act has not existed in Canada for nearly 40 years. It was replaced by the Emergencies Act, which explicitly does not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, unlike its predecessors. It just goes to show how knowledgeable the previous poster is on the subject.

Indeed. But just to be even more clear:

> which explicitly does not violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Indeed indeed. However, it does limit the rights and freedoms in the Charter, and it does so in a way that the Charter allows. The Charter provides an escape hatch in exceptional circumstances, and that is not by accident: it is by design. And anyone who would design the Charter without this escape hatch probably has no business being in governance, because it would just be a ticking time bomb to a constitutional crisis.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#287

I do not own any crypto myself. The grown-up opinion is of course to view all crypto ""investments"" with extreme skepticism, which is an absolutely sane and correct position. With that said, I like the idea of cryptocurrencies simply because they are punk as f*ck, and I'd like whatever leadership in charge to know that they do not have absolute power to run anyone else's life. Apart from magic internet money, I cann…

HN is weirdly inconsistent about digital currencies. Generally pro encryption, net neutrality, open-source software, VPNs, etc. But mention "Bitcoin," and suddenly half the commenters lose their shit about the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse.

Then they go back to commiserating with another Ask HN startup founder whose PayPal account was frozen.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#288
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His claim... "it collapsed, because it doesn’t bring anything useful for society" ...is incorrect. The total crypto market cap collapsed because of interest rate hikes. Nvidia's stock dropped 68%. Is that because it didn't bring anything useful for society? No. It was trading at a premium because of low rates.

So much for crypto being an inflation hedge.

It's a hedge against currency debasement. And it hedged pretty well against that! From the moment M2 supply increased (Feb 2020) to the moment M2 began decreasing(jan 2022), bitcoin earned you almost 400%.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#289
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The repeating theme of crypto fans postulating "free" cashflow without government involvment is the road to salvation is annoying me so much. Cashflow without government involvement is the absolute opposite of democratic freedom. Take literally any autocratic government ripe with corruption, look at Russia, China et al. Look at any large criminal organization which tries to avoid democratically elected governmental r…

Going the other direction where government controls all aspects of society is what the USSR and China decided was the best system. When the USSR broke up they gave all citizens ownership of previously held state enterprises which was worthless to them and those shares were sold ended up in few players hands. Crypto is the opposite where miners hold as much power as developers to create a balance. You can't sue in Can…

I am not going into the other direction though. I am not in any way saying the USSR or Chinese political system is or was desirable.

I explicitly gave the judicial branch as implemented in Western democratic societies as an example.

I'm no expert in Canadian politics, but to me it seems reasonable to assume that, just like in any other Western democratic society, the gov introducing wartime measures isn't what's day to day due process 99.9% of the time.

So you arguing based on extreme examples, which are at least partially out of context isn't really adding anything substantial to the discussion at hand I think.

How do miners hold as much power as big ass capitalists in a crypto world??

Look at the numbers for the distribution of crypto whales: https://insights.glassnode.com/bitcoin-supply-distribution-r...

Look at basic economic theory: Those who hold access to the means of production will accrue capital steadily over time.

Always has been that way, always will be.

Whether you mine a currency and then spend, or a government mints a currency, distributes it to you and then you spend has no effect on the matter.

Re: Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Online dark net markets would not be possible without cryptos. They are a pretty big win for those who believe in personal liberty.

Yes, crypto's main use is crime. Its supporters have various arguments for why crime is actually good.

What a childish argument
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